A Traitor Guardsman
by Raex
Summary: A traitor guardsman speaks of his former life and his discovery of Chaos.


It has been so long since I did not see, so long since I did not know the Truth.

I recall that I was a Guardsman, one of many similarly trapped in the unreal dream of reality. I recall not the name of my home, for perhaps I never had one, how can a dream be a home if you never recall it when waking up?

Parts of my dream are still clear though, such as the coming of the waking, the arrival of realization and the opening of my eyes.

We were stationed on a world, a world of great engines and forges and men of metal clad in robes of the deepest crimson. The days on that world went by like a rush of thoughts, muddled and indistinct, the faces of my comrades and officers appearing shadowed and nightmarish in their clarity.

Everyone was taken by surprise, even in their preparedness, when the hazy shapes that tended the machines in the background suddenly stopped in their monotonous tasks and rebelled against the rules of the dream. They turned their tools toward the men of metal and disassembled them with a quickness born of practice and outrage at their imprisonment. They turned on each other, for not all had accepted the truth of their prison. They turned on us, for we were their unwitting wardens, assigned to keep them from escaping the clutches of the dream we thought was real.

Those inexistent days were nightmare of nothing but fire and blood, of limbs fluttering through the air like butterflies and waves of figures charging only to break upon a wall of light. I know not how much time had passed when They came. Their vehicles blazed through the sky on trails of fire, drop pods streaking down like meteors to impact the ground like the wrath of a god and flyers like giant mechanical birds opened their gullets in mid-air to drop them down into the blood-red mist that permeated the world.

At first we thought we were saved, that the angels had come to our aid in preventing the awakening. But then we realized, these were not angels, but daemons.

From within the fog of their arrival they came forward, their blood-red armor burning our eyes with its splendor for we had never seen true glory before. The maws of their guns blazing with fire that tore apart the seams of the world where they hit and bursting the bodies of my comrades in glorious defiance of our unknowing life of servitude. There were others whose forms seemed to make a mockery of this unreal reality with their mere existence, their faces distended into gigantic fang-filled mouths, their hands adorned with claws of impossible sharpness, the very flesh of their bodies seamlessly joined with the plasteel and ceramite of their armor. But there was one in particular, he held in his hands a pistol of impossible shape and in the other a mace permeated with reality-eroding energies and moulded in the shape of an eight-pointed star. I knew from the brief moment I first saw him that he was their leader, though I did not know his true significance until much later.

We fought as we had before the daemons had arrived, but where we had previously in our ignorance held at bay the armies of the awakened, we were now being steadily pushed back. Wherever the crimson heralds of our downfall walked our forces died, those who did not were persuaded to see what we had not even known was there and willingly joined the armies of the awoken.

It was during one such battle that my own awakening had come.

We were attempting to hold them at bay using the fortifications of a hive city and for many hours did we think ourselves successful in our objective. Our scouts had not seen the reality-defying warriors in this part of our prison and our belief that we were secure from them was what brought about our defeat. They came from nowhere and everywhere at once, they blasted apart our defences with righteous fury and anger and within mere minutes we had fallen and the city along with us.

I believed we were going to die there and, in a way, we did. We and many others were brought to a great plaza where the crimson warriors had assembled and there on a great podium stood their leader, his star-shaped mace blazing in his hand and his eyes glowing with a terrible brilliance. He stood there and looked at us, his gaze sweeping over every soul trapped in this terrible place. And then he spoke. His words flowing through the minds of all assembled, burning away the veil of lies that had blinded our eyes for so long, his voice drawing from a seemingly bottomless well of knowledge and wisdom. It was then that I understood why I was on this world, why the workers of the manufactoria had rebelled, why the armies of the awakened swelled with each victory they gained, why he and his Word Bearers had come to this place. It was then that I understood the truth.

And that is why I march now under a broken sky the colour of shattered falsehoods, why I march beside my former enemies against my former allies. I have awoken from the terrible dream that is reality and, whether they want it or not, I will help bring the word to those who still remain trapped, to open their eyes to the truth:

There is nothing.

But Chaos.


End file.
